Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Washington University in St. Louis
2023 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition
The MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis educates artists who will define and change the future of their disciplines—in small, medium, and extra-large ways.
It instills students with the agency and resiliency that will be essential to the next generation of artists. Led by professor and chair Lisa Bulawsky, the program is home to an inclusive, close-knit community of renegade makers and thinkers and offers students a site of rigorous inquiry, humanity, and intellectual generosity.
The program is located within a tier-one research institution and is proud of its location in St. Louis, which serves as both an extension of the studio and site of engagement for art and artists.
The MFA in Visual Art professionally prepares students for a diversified approach to the field of contemporary art that nurtures sustained, lifelong engagement while recognizing multiple pathways and definitions for a career in the arts and culture. Learn more about the MFA in Visual Art program at samfoxschool.wustl.edu/mfa-va
Lisa Bulawsky
Professor & Chair, MFA in Visual Art
Director, Island Press
Amy Hauft
Director, College of Art and Graduate School of Art
Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman Jr. Professor of Art
Carmon Colangelo
Ralph J. Nagel Dean, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
Jamie Adams
Heather Bennett
Meghan Kirkwood
Arny Nadler
Patricia Olynyk
Tim Portlock
Jack Risley
Denise Ward-Brown
Cheryl Wassenaar
Monika Weiss
2023 MFA in Visual Art Students
Alex Braden
Allena Marie Brazier
Alex Rosborough Davis
Jamie Lee Harris
Megan Kenyon
Sharlene Lee
Jorge Rios
Anna Schenker
Seulki Seo
Samantha Slone
Karen L. Yung
Essays
Jenny Wu
Jenny Wu is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She holds an MA in art history and an MFA in fiction writing, both from Washington University in St. Louis. She has written for BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Millions, and Ploughshares and organized exhibitions in St. Louis and New York.
Editor
Caitlin Custer
Photographers
Dmitri Jackson and Kalaija Mallery
Designer
James Walker
Exhibition Organizer
Leslie Markle, Curator for Public Art, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Printer
Advertisers Printing
Publisher
Washington University in St. Louis
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
© 2023 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher.
The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ 2023 Thesis Exhibition, the air that inhabits , is about what goes unsung in daily life and yet remains no less necessary: a backyard tree, a basketball hoop, labor, infrastructure, language, daydreams. Showcasing works by 11 artists completing their MFAs in Visual Art, the exhibition inhabits a spacious gallery on the ground floor of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The projects on view range from multimedia installations to abstract paintings and represent the culmination of two years of intense study, experimentation, and fellowship for the following class of graduates: Alex Braden, Allena Marie Brazier, Alex Rosborough Davis, Jamie Lee Harris, Megan Kenyon, Sharlene Lee, Jorge Rios, Anna Schenker, Seulki Seo, Samantha Slone, and Karen L. Yung.
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.
Margaret Atwood, “Variation on the Word Sleep”
The show borrows its title from Margaret Atwood’s “Variation on the Word Sleep,” a complex poem written in deceptively pellucid free verse. What can be read as a love poem may just as well be a poem about grief. It begins, “I would like to watch you sleeping, / which may not happen. / I would like to watch you, / sleeping.” In the first line, the speaker seems to pine over a desire that is likely one-sided—it is possible, after all, that watching her beloved sleep “may not happen.” However, if we consider that the word “sleep” is a euphemism for death, Atwood’s second line evokes a different image, one in which the speaker watches over her beloved in death. Later strophes reference “three moons,” which, in Neopagan traditions, signify the progression from youth to maturity to wisdom and death; a “silver branch,” which, in Irish mythology, symbolizes entry into the Celtic Otherworld—the land of the deities and the dead; and “a flame / in two cupped hands,” which calls up the image of an eternal flame, present in many cultures around the world.
The sense of alchemy and transfiguration that animates Atwood’s poem appears in the abstract paintings of Jorge Rios, in whose liquid strokes the membrane between this world and another grows faint. Meanwhile, the entire exhibition seems to oscillate between the poles of love and grief. Those unacknowledged details that give texture to everyday life—a dish of strawberry candies, a skein of pastel-colored yarn stuffed
into an antique drawer—hold joy and pain in equal parts, bundled one inside the other. Jamie Lee Harris’s thesis project, dedicated to loved ones in her family who have passed away in recent years, addresses this duality directly. Other works, like those of Samantha Slone and Anna Schenker, are homages to landscapes and flora, ideas wrapped up in both ecological grief and our intense longing to see the world clearly, for what it is and was. For artists Alex Rosborough Davis, Allena Marie Brazier, and Megan Kenyon—whose works honor communities, neighborhoods, and institutions facing the daily impacts of homophobia, racism, and misogyny—love is a lodestar and a form of tactical resistance.
What does it mean to inhabit the body of another? Perhaps it means to walk a mile in their shoes, the way Sharlene Lee’s thesis invites us to consider how it feels to be perceived as an Other. Perhaps the inhabitation is as physical as what Alex Braden achieves through a sound installation whose frequencies permeate the fleshy bodies of visitors. Or perhaps to picture oneself as “air that inhabits” is to imagine the body eluding capture, becoming nonhuman or more-than-human, like Seulki Seo’s totemic forms, wayward women of the future who take up space in metropolises and reclaim lost labor and agency, or like Karen L. Yung’s dripping rock formations that stand guard in dwellings, their cohabitation a form of protection from malevolent forces.
From its largest interactive installation to its smallest seed capsule, the air that inhabits displays a penchant for portals, altars, and futurity. Rigorously researched and ambitiously installed, the show makes the case that another world is possible, either beyond or within the one we inhabit.
Jenny Wu
Installation view, the air that inhabits: 2023 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition.
Alex Braden 6
Allena Marie Brazier 10
Alex Rosborough Davis 14
Jamie Lee Harris 18
Megan Kenyon 22
Sharlene Lee 26
Jorge Rios 30
Anna Schenker 34
Seulki Seo 38
Samantha Slone 42
Karen L. Yung 46
Alex Braden
Alex Braden is a sound, installation, and performance artist whose influences range from jazz and classical music to Radiohead and Oneohtrix Point Never. Nurturing a fascination with analog technologies, Braden works to defamiliarize viewers with common sound-producing objects such as pianos, rotary phones, tape machines, and record players.
Braden’s contribution to the thesis exhibition, a sound and mixed media sculpture titled Decanter II: In Defense of Daydreaming (2023), features a record player spinning slowly, holding a long, paintbrush-like arm. Copper wires sprout from the end of the arm, and as the record player spins, the wires brush against electrified strings stretched taut between the top and bottom of a minimalistic pine platform that encases the amalgamated instrument. When the strings are brushed, a random note fires off from a list of a thousand potential samples and resonates through the gallery, filling the space with continuous yet erratic swells of sound, some glassy and expansive, others terse and punctuated, like raindrops.
The sound that emanates from Braden’s sculpture may slow the listener’s perception of time, lending a tense, mysterious air to the exhibition, particularly in its immediate vicinity. Approaching the source of the ambiguous sound, the visitor sees a void in the scaffolding, an unlabeled record spinning in what seems like perpetual motion. Time is unmoored from a sense of beginning, middle, and end and instead allowed to flow freely as when one is daydreaming. As its title suggests, the work is like a decanter for sound: just as wine in a decanter aerates and matures, exposure to Braden’s sound over the course of a visit to the museum creates familiarity with the non-pattern and induces a sensation that the tones are congealing over time into an enveloping and omnipresent entity.
Allena Marie Brazier is an artist and curator whose regionally focused work examines urban environments and edgelands—the meeting places of cities and their surrounding rural landscapes. Her recent work Back Home and across tha River (2023) is a large-scale sculptural installation that seamlessly mixes index, metaphor, and metonymy. Personal artifacts from the artist’s home in East St. Louis—her childhood basketball hoop, family photos—are arranged around an asphalt court with the words “RED LINE” painted on the free-throw line. The installation is set in front of a portal of blue sky painted on the museum wall flanked by emergency orange sandbags referencing floods and hazards.
Central to Brazier’s work is her constant physical movement across the Mississippi River. By crossing the river, she carries and layers histories of the region into her practice. In 1917, for instance, her grandfather experienced the East St. Louis race riots, during which between 39 and 150 Black Americans in East St. Louis were massacred by whites. Arson and vandalism by the white population left another 6,000 Black residents homeless. Two decades later, the Federal Housing Administration established redlining policies that refused loans to those living in majority-Black neighborhoods deemed financially hazardous.
In Brazier’s work, space and time intersect within the field of play. The horizontal plane marked by the phrase “RED LINE” intersects with the vertical totems containing her family history and an ode to generational inheritance. The basketball hoop, despite its missing net, remains functional, inviting viewers to look up and imagining a parabolic flight and the countless individuals who have grown up playing in the streets. Transported across the river, the basketball hoop becomes a new kind of gathering place: an instigator of discourse in a museum setting, a portal leading from a rarefied space of preservation and display out into a world of flux and improvisation.
Alex Rosborough Davis writes in “The Queer Constructivist Manifesto,” which is distributed on loose sheets of pink paper as part of their installation Magnus Hirschfeld Queer Revolutionary Library (2023), “We believe in additive art making processes, bringing together the abandoned, hidden, broken, and discarded, so that the Queer materials and objects of the world can unite and gain [...] collective strength.”
Accordingly, Davis’s thesis project is a grouping of disparate large-scale objects organized around the motif of a triad reminiscent of the pink and black triangles used in Nazi Germany to mark queer peoples in concentration camps and later reclaimed by LGBTQ+ activists. At the Kemper Art Museum, a pink and monochrome flag hangs over a stack of Davis’s manifestos. Triangular cushions are scattered on the floor, and an asterisk-shaped sculpture—an amalgam of oncediscarded I-beams, salvaged wood, and a brass stanchion—lounges anthropomorphically in fishnet stockings. It is often in such industrial objects that Davis finds a spark of queerness.
The centerpiece of the installation is a formidable steel bookcase dedicated to the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), founder of the Institute for Sexual Sciences, whose library was targeted and burned by Nazis in 1933. Davis’s roaming library pays homage to the lost library by collecting the artist’s own curated selection of titles from Jack Halberstam’s theoretical text The Queer Art of Failure to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood. Davis’s homage is tactical in nature—it can be disassembled and moved into areas attacked by contemporary proponents of book-banning. With its design rooted in Russian Constructivism, a school of thought that originated in 1915, emphasized the use of industrial materials and assemblage, and subsequently influenced 20th-century modern art movements such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl, Davis’s library serves as a dense tissue of interconnected texts that invites viewers to linger with the history of queer resistance.
broken mirror, and steel; grout and inkjet prints, 92 x 26 x 77 inches; Of Prurient Interest, 2023. Salvaged materials: steel, brass, wood, and fishnet stockings; spray paint, 46 x 65 x 64 inches.
Jamie Lee Harris is painter and ceramicist whose work brings mourning practices of West Africa into conversation with those of the Baptist church and across the African diaspora. One of the two works that comprise her thesis project, We Sing, We Wail, We Wake, for Homegoing’s Sake (2023), is a monumental oil painting depicting a funeral scene at First Baptist Church City of St. Louis. At the foot of the painting is a predella housing objects like Arcor strawberry bonbons and a speckled shell. In the painting, the casket is switched for terracotta urns resembling 3rd- to 11th-century grave markers used by the Bura peoples of the Niger River Valley.
Maame Wata Awaits for You, Ma (2023), Harris’s second work, is a six-foot-one-inch ceramic vessel dedicated to the artist’s late mother, Tammy Harris, and stands at her mother’s height. The vessel contains a figure in its womb-like abdomen, who seems to be frozen in a moment of speech with one hand outstretched. In the bed of sand around the base of the vessel is a terracotta face that resembles a 19th- or 20th-century helmet mask from the Bamum kingdom in Cameroon. The image of a feminine vessel that houses smaller figures calls to mind a curious medieval Christian altarpiece made in the Rhine valley circa 1300, titled Shrine of the Virgin, wherein the body of Mary opens to reveal a statuette of God the father.
For Harris, the work of art serves as a container for memory, both personal and cultural, in the face of mortality and erasure. Harris draws from texts such as Saidiya Hartman’s 2006 book Lose Your Mother , which argues that to lose one’s lineage, as many members of the African diaspora have, is to be cut off from the past. In response to the amnesia of colonial violence and the ephemerality of individual life, Harris’s two- and three-dimensional altars preserve the umbilic ties that bind the past to the present and future.
Megan Kenyon’s socially engaged practice interrogates American evangelical norms and the lived experiences of Christian women through an intersectional lens. Her work both criticizes patriarchy within the church and emphasizes the restorative potential of the community it engenders. The practicing Christians who are the subjects of Kenyon’s investigations are women and nonbinary individuals who have come forth about injustices they have witnessed or suffered as members of the church.
The title of Kenyon’s thesis project, How I Got Over / To the Church in America (2023), is bifurcated by a productive enjambment that suggests both “getting over”—recovering from— and “getting across to”—via a collective testimony—the evangelical church, which remains a center of gravity in many Mid-American communities despite the problems that Kenyon’s interviewees point out. The project grew from a call the artist put out on Facebook, which attracted the involvement of twenty-some woman-identifying participants from across the US. The resulting installation is a blend of text, image, and performance documentation displayed on a wall and on an adjoining pulpit.
Presented alongside portrait photographs of the interviewees are messages printed on washes of red dye, erasure poems derived from Bible passages, and a folio containing additional missives, which viewers are invited to handle. In the mix are also photographs of a wooden pulpit the artist stationed in church parking lots around St. Louis. On the pulpit are sheets of paper that read, for instance, “I was screaming out for help / You pretend not to hear me.” Here, the lone pulpit personifies the silenced individual, amplifying an anonymous— yet unambiguous—message to church officials. As a liminal space, the church parking lot comes to represent the marginal position many congregation members occupy. In Kenyon’s photographs, wind lifts corners of the pages from the pulpit, seconds before sweeping the messages away. The dynamic moments Kenyon captures thus become a chance expression of ephemerality and fugitivity.
Sharlene Lee is a mixed-media artist whose practice centers on concepts of home and belonging, particularly among immigrant communities and members of the Chinese diaspora. In her work, she has examined the use of public space across cultures, the way architectural elements like void decks in Singapore organize movement and interactions, and how gendersegregated common areas in Malaysia inscribe social expectations on their occupants.
Lee’s installation
Well-spoken (2023) uses language barriers to illustrate power disparities and to induce an experience of Otherness in the viewer. In a black box gallery, uncannily realistic projections of everyday people stand side by side, facing the interior of the room. They represent strangers in need of assistance, though they speak such a wide variety of languages that even polyglots would feel at times disoriented. The viewer, surrounded in a sonic cocoon and confronted with postures of impatience—some of the life-size figures stand with their hands in their pockets, others peck at their phones or hold notepads—is likely to feel as if they are under interrogation, though the figures’ requests are often as mundane as, “Which way is the library?”
Lee is influenced by a variety of practitioners of new media including Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (b. 1943). As in Wodiczko’s St. Louis Projections (2004), Lee uses projection technology to create a sense of intimacy and discomfort. However, the roles in Well-spoken are flipped: the projected speaker is not the vulnerable one—and neither is the viewer. In Lee’s work, technology reinscribes the boundary between the viewer and their virtual interlocutor. The projected images remain peripheral and speak to the viewer, not to each other. In this way, the viewer’s relationship with them literalizes a performance of center and margin. Placed in the position of a switchboard operator and translator, the viewer gradually becomes a more active listener.
Jorge Rios is a painter’s painter. According to the artist—who was born in atheist Cuba prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union—painting is an act of reproducing theological creation. It is due partly to design and partly to chance that content emerges out of the labor-intensive process of creation, whereby primary colors are remade into a matrix of something new.
Rios’s process-based work in oil and watercolor traffics in the poetics of the primordial and preverbal and occupies the unsettled territory between loose gesture and meticulous control. Influenced by Cuban artists such as José Bedia, Flavio Garciandía, and Tomás Sanchez, as well as by Americans like Helen Frankenthaler, who was known for painting with diluted oils, and Christopher Wool, whose paintings incorporate intimations of language through line and letter, Rios presents as his thesis a suite of works titled Azul, Amarillo, Rojo (2023). Here, four large sheets of Arches paper mounted on wood panels are covered in watercolor and acrylic marker. Rios employs abstract strokes, drips, and stains that play with vision in such a way that the works look flat one moment and like windows the next. Although the panels are titled after three primary colors, their palettes also include splashy oranges, murky greens, bruised orchids, and free-flowing mixtures of shades in between.
Dark drip marks traverse the paintings’ surfaces, running horizontally, like the rain that travels across car windows at high speeds, creating a sense of cardinal disorientation. Rios seems to suggest that his paintings’ center of gravity differs from the viewer’s. Together with thick bands of color crisscrossing the surface, the drip marks snare the eye as one tries to read the panels in either horizontal direction. While certain hues repeat across panels, ultimately the paintings stand as four individual presences, and each plays by its own internal rules.
Anna Schenker’s airy and archipelagic rubbing of a tree trunk stretches down a wall in the Kemper Art Museum. The artist’s practice, which often employs wax crayon and natural elements, takes as its methodology a kind of slow indexing. Quite the opposite of a contemporary digital photograph, this type of record requires prolonged, tactile interaction with a subject from multiple angles. To create the large-scale rubbing, titled 7.30.22–8.3.22, VT (2022–23), the artist wrapped the trunk of a tree in the backyard of her childhood home in muslin and built a tilted grid on which to display the pitted texture of the tree bark, which she transferred and flattened, like a topographical map, onto the fabric.
A second, intimately scaled work in the show, Sky Containers, Nov 22 (2023), consists of plastic capsules in which white, feathery thistle seeds look as if they are suspended in blue air. The blue in the containers is acrylic paint, and the constructed quality of the diorama—the siloed capsules each containing a microcosm of the entire atmosphere—gives the seeds each a sense of individuality and, in a way, subjectivity. Blue ties Schenker’s body of work together both visually and symbolically, drawing associations between her childhood memories and longer timespans, invoking the spiritual significance of lapis lazuli in ancient Egypt, the incendiary popularity of indigo dye in 16th-century trade, and countless experiments throughout history by chemists and artists alike to perfect the otherworldly hue.
Schenker allows the wooden lattice on which the muslin is stretched to show through the weave of the fabric. The rigid right angles of the constructed grid contrast the flowing organicity of the bark and seeds. Viewers are reminded that the wood was also part of a tree, a piece of the natural environment, and, in this way, Schenker shows how even the material support around an artwork, which supposedly sets it apart from the rest of the world, is yet another extension of our relationship with the earth.
Seulki Seo is a mixed-media artist whose work is situated at the intersection of technology and ecology. Her subjects exist on unfathomably large scales and constitute what the thinker Timothy Morton has termed “hyperobjects”—systems like race, class, and climate change that take on lives of their own, indifferent to human understanding. In her work, Seo utilizes motifs both visual—the obelisk, for example—and theoretical. In 2019, she synthesized her ideas into the concept of the Extracted Entity, a phrase that refers to any person or thing that has been uprooted and relocated against its will.
Seo’s video installation Noises, Words, Echoes (2023) presents a series of five screens on which supercuts of contemporary civilization flash in rapid succession. Extraction is a central motif here, as we see images of mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alongside montages of queer Black dancers voguing, an art form often exploited by white documentarians, such as when Jennie Livingston made the 1990 film Paris is Burning featuring working-class voguers but withheld compensation from the performers. Other critiques that run through Seo’s videos are directed toward transnational corporations, religion, technocolonialism, and the physical infrastructure of the web most netizens take for granted.
Across from the five-channel video installation is another three-screen installation, titled Sam In Sung Ho (삼인성호) from the series Froward Women (2022–23). This project draws from a 17th-century text that denigrated women, calling them lewd, idle, and “froward.” At the time, the word “froward” meant “habitually disposed to disobedience and opposition.” In Seo’s video, “froward women” become abstract totems that one day appear on the streets of Los Angeles: obstinate, obstructive, and oppositional, they stand with the dignity of caryatids and the unknowability of hyperobjects, postulating a future unyoked from the sensory overload and thankless overwork of the archived past.
Samantha Slone’s eco-critical art practice asks viewers to consider the screens, mirrors, and viewfinders that govern their relationships with landscapes, consumption, and society. Reaching for imagery beyond that of plant life, pollution, and waste, Slone seeks instead to attune us to sightlines and habits of perception, drawing out the subtle politics of constructed landscapes—from Astroturf to topiaries to digitally mediated hyperreality.
Slone’s thesis project, A Phantom and a Fly (2023), combines the screen obsession of Nam June Paik with the stark contemporary eco-aesthetics of Sung Tieu. To view Slone’s work, visitors enter a dimly lit sanctum whose walls are lined with mirror-like panes. On one wall are three stacked liquid-crystal displays, and around them on adjacent walls are polarizing filters. It is only through these filters that viewers can see the three images on the liquid-crystal displays. The images represent landscapes rendered in various ways, some idealized and some abstract, but all circumscribed within a critique of a middle-class propensity for sanitation and nostalgia. No matter how the viewer stands to see the three flickering landscapes, their face remains in view in the filtering panes. What results is a peculiar juxtaposition of land and flesh, of macro and micro countenances.
In the center of the room, on a mat of Astroturf, a tall skeletal lattice is illuminated from within by two garden lights. The bright, hot bulbs point at a central void in the lattice, but glancing up one finds an image of citrus fruit affixed like a ceiling fresco to the top of the structure. Here, fruit, grass, and containment become scattered signifiers, seemingly divorced from one another and from the causal cycles of the natural world. Slone’s work thus suggests how anthropocentric activity has disrupted the material logic of the planet. At the same time, this uncanny installation shows the agency we have over our means of perception and interpretation.
Karen L. Yung is a multimedia artist whose eclectic sensibility shines through in her amalgamated sculptural works. Like bowerbirds, her family has always collected rocks— including stalagmites—and used them to fill their home in Houston, Texas, with favorable feng shui. Yung’s thesis project, Home (2023), is a speckled antique apothecary cabinet that the artist turned into a Wunderkammer. Outfitted with curios in its drawers and adorned with plaster-coated wires, the cabinet resembles a landform overtaken by stalagmites. Between suspended drips of celadon green and coral-colored plaster and wax, the drawers are labeled with paper tags, spelling out oblique phrases like “for health,” “for winter,” “for longevity.”
Unlike traditional Wunderkammers, which were, in the 16th century, used to house collectibles associated with natural history, ethnography, and archaeology, Yung’s Home is not a collection of exoticized trinkets. It is one of familiar, everyday comforts like bowls of incense ash and red envelopes stuffed with cash. Yung displays nostalgic symbols of a childhood spent in Houston’s Chinatown as the daughter of immigrants and restaurant owners in such a way that viewers can discover and reflect on their own memories of growing up. In this way, Home serves as a time capsule and a site of remembrance.
Meanwhile, the sculpture traffics in the visual language of ruin and ephemerality. The wax stalagmites look as if they are melting and decomposing. They coil in a way that signals both telephone cords and wild tendrils. At once natural and artificial, the work casts its sights forward to a time when nature might indeed mingle with humanmade objects, the two becoming indistinguishable from one another. In Yung’s work, one can imagine them—the stalagmite plucked from a cave and the house in which it is placed for good feng shui—growing old together and becoming, over time, one and the same.
